kiscica

We have Amazon Alexa devices in most rooms of the house. We all sometimes use them as an "intercom" to get the attention of other family members. For those not familiar with this feature, basically, you say "Alexa, announce $FOO" and ever device in the house makes an attention-getting noise and then says "$FOO" (it's an actual recording of what you said, not Alexa repeating it in her own voice). Mildly useful.

Now, I've noticed that Alexa also transcribes the announcement, and sends a text notification to my iPhone (where I have the Alexa app installed). The transcription is generally quite accurate -- except when my daughter is saying something to get my attention, or vice-versa. That's because she and I usually speak Hungarian and Alexa, of course, does not know how to transcribe Hungarian. If one of us makes a Hungarian announcement, Alexa just transcribes it as some English gibberish that sounds vaguely similar.

So far so good. Last night, my daughter made an announcement (in English) that included our cat's name. Our cat is named Meeka Macska. It's a rather unique name (there are, for example, zero hits on Google for the phrase "Meeka Macska" or "Meekamacska"). The name means, basically, "Meeka the Cat"; "macska" is Hungarian for "cat," but Meeka is written in English orthography; in Hungarian it would be "Mika." Alexa transcribed the announcement correctly.

I cannot for the life of me understand how Alexa knows the spelling of our cat's name. My daughter and I did some experiments. Announcements (again, in English) containing the word "macska" without "Meeka," regardless of context, were never transcribed with that orthography; it was always gibberish. Actual examples: "much go," "Marsha." "much Scott," "March come." We never once got "macska" back. On the other hand, announcements containing "Meeka" without "Macska" were reliably transliterated with "Mika," which makes some sense, because "Mika" seems to be an established name (2 orders of magnitude more hits on Google than "Meeka").

In fact, the announcement "Meeka the macska," i.e. including both components of the name but separated by one word, came out "Mika the Much Car." The variant "Mooka Macska," on the other hand, was usually transcribed as "Meeka Macska" (I got "Luke much dog" and "Luke must go" on two occasions), even when I was vary careful in articulating the "oo" sound. "Mooka Kutya" ("Mooka the dog," a purely hypothetical name) was transcribed with various kinds of gibberish, e.g. "Mukul Cloutier" (!) and "Move the couch" (!!). and once I was rewarded with a disconcerting "whooop!" noise -- it turns out that if Alexa thinks you said "good job," which I must admit is not a bad guess for "kutya," it makes that noise before the announcement.

My conclusion is that "Meeka Macska" is a phrase in Alexa's voice transcription database -- I assume it's customized to our voices, and not global. It seems far too consistent to be random chance. "Mukul Cloutier" isn't a phrase that appears in Google either, but I only elicited that once. "Meeka Macska," on the other hand, comes out every time.

I'm forced to assume that Alexa/Amazon knows the phrase because of text that originated from me at some point. The part that is a mystery is this: I have never entered the words "Meeka Macska" into any website or application that I know to be linked to Amazon in any way. It's not like I have much occasion to write down our cat's name, anyway. It's probably been in a few private emails, text messages, and the occasional Facebook post (always visible only to my friends list). I hate to blame Facebook or Google (Gmail) by default, and I also find it hard to believe that they'd be sharing the actual text content of posts or messages with Amazon.

What's going on here? Anyone have any ideas?